Thoughts from the interface of science, religion, law and culture

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

EVENTS

Hurricane Katrina? Thanks, Obama!

Public Policy Polling has a new poll out with a rather startling result. In a survey of Louisiana voters, more Republicans in that state blame Obama for the federal response to Hurricane Katrina than blame Bush. Obama, of course, had nothing to do with it, he had just taken his seat in the Senate a few months earlier.

A significant chunk of Louisiana Republicans evidently believe that President Barack Obama is to blame for the poor response to the hurricane that ravaged their state more than three years before he took office.

The latest survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, provided exclusively to TPM, showed an eye-popping divide among Republicans in the Bayou State when it comes to accountability for the government’s post-Katrina blunders.

Twenty-eight percent said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible. Nearly half of Louisiana Republicans — 44 percent — said they aren’t sure who to blame.

Now, this is to some extent a “gotcha” poll question. They only gave two options, Bush or Obama, when they could have also asked about the mayor, the government, the state’s representatives in Congress, FEMA and so forth. But it still says something very disturbing about how people form opinions on important questions. We all are prone to tribalism, confirmation biases and all the other ways that our brains subvert our rationality, but it should also be clear that most people (and not just these particular Republicans) do not base their political beliefs on rational thinking at all.

You forgot about the time machine again. Obama is responsible for everything, the less likely he was involved the more certain it is he did it. For events before he was born it is a dead certainty that he flew in on the OFTM and, for example, stabbed Julius Caesar.

1) I think the Democratic pollsters did us a disservice by NOT asking the Louisiana voters WHY they blamed
Obama more than Bush.

That would have let us tell if they are simply brainwashed by deceitful Republican propaganda (e.g, Fox), if they are ignorant, or if they felt that Obama and the other 99 Senators should have got off their ass and done something other than pose.

I mean, what is the Senate good for other than to enjoy the benefits of power (being bribed by the Rich) while accepting no responsibility for the state of the nation?

2) Bush was obviously incompetent — I could never tell if that was because he was a fool, deeply corrupt (and hence focused only on the concerns of the Rich, not the People) or both. But he at least accepted that he was — more or less — responsible for results. Even in the worst of his goatfucks, that gave him an advantage over two-faced poseurs who are just polishing their resume as another step up the Empire’s Cursus_Honorum.

But seriously, this is like that poll showing that Republicans think Obama is a Muslim. If you ask a question, “did Obama do a bad thing or is a bad type of person”, they will always say yes. I guess that’s telling in and of itself, but we don’t need a poll to tell us that wingnuts associate the President with all things evil.

I worry more that it’s acting like an unintentional push-poll, and actively increasing the level of ignorance. Without a name prompt, people might have remembered correctly who was in office. By giving names, I bet some of the respondents started to doubt their initial thoughts about it being Bush.

I bet at least some internal narratives went like this: “Gee, I don’t remember Obama being around then. But this poll guy is probably pretty smart. If his question includes Obama as an option, Obama must have been important back then. Maybe I was wrong to blame Bush all this time. Pick Obama!”

#6
Well Don the Democrats have a whole network dedicated to lying about them and putting everything they do in the worst possible light while promoting Republicans and ignoring the crap they do. Also the Democrats did not “take charge” of Congress. The Republicans still had enough votes to do a perpetual filibuster of anything the Democrats tried to do. The fact is they used the filibuster more times during Obama than any other President.

Funny how you can keep someone from doing their job yet with a straight face blame them for not doing their job.

To be far a lot of people have poor recollections of the passage of time and when events happened. I would imagine a few of the respondents actually think Hurricane Katrina struck after Bush left office. Of course the chance to find yet another thing to blame on Obama doesn’t help.

Re Alverant at 10: “Also the Democrats did not “take charge” of Congress. The Republicans still had enough votes to do a perpetual filibuster of anything the Democrats tried to do. The fact is they used the filibuster more times during Obama than any other President.”

So why hasn’t Reid destroyed the filibuster? What purpose does it serve other than giving several Democratic Senators the opportunity to sell out and defect to the Republicans whenever we give Democrats control of the White House, a huge supermajority in the House and a filibuster proof majority in the Senate.

Rank and file Democrats could work their asses off putting 90 Democrats in the Senate — and at the opportune moment 31 of those Senators would defect to the Republicans and we would have a mob of Democratic “activists” springing up on Daily Kos to give incoherent explanations for why 10 Republicans are still running the US Government.

I am tired of this two-faced bullshit. When George W Bush came to power in January 2001, he was able to steal $3 Trillion out of the Social Security/Medicare Trust Funds and hand it to the Rich within a few months –even though there were 50 Democrats in the Senate. Where was the magic filibuster then?

Obama hatred has become a conditioned reflex for many republicans. Just saying his name drives them into a frothing rage. It doesn’t matter what the questions was. It could have been who killed the Lindbergh baby. Once they saw Obama’s name, they exploded into an uncontrollable blamestorm.

1) Maybe Clinton is held partially responsible for Sept 11 because during his Administration Al Qaeda blew up two of our embassies, blew a huge hole in the USS Cole and bombed the World Trade Center — and yet Bill Clinton did nothing to deal with them even though he had 8 years to do so and was Commander of the world’s nuclear superpower/hegemon. If Clinton had approved the CIA’s request to assassinate Bin Laden, 3000 Americans would not have died on Sept 11, 2001.

2) Of course, one can understand Clinton’s timidness — he had thrown a million soldiers and intel workers away like used toilet paper to reduce the deficit with the Republicans.

2) When your national security advisor has to sneak into the National Archives and commit a felony stealing classified papers , it’s kinda clear that you really don’t want the historians taking a look
at how you performed:

The answer to that is very simple and I’m surprised that a graduate of Utter Vacuous Assholes didn’t know the answer. The reason is that the Dems will not always be in control of the Senate and in the event the Rethugs take over, they want to be in a position to block legislation and appointments, just like the latter have done. See how simple that is.

It is helpful, when trying to understand beliefs like this, to consider Richard Hofstader’s conception of the fundamentalist’s relation to reality.

The issues of the actual world are hence transformed into a spiritual Armageddon, an ultimate reality, in which any reference to day-by-day actualities has the character of an allegorical illustration, and not of the empirical evidence that ordinary men offer for ordinary conclusions. Thus, when a right-wing leader accuses Dwight D Eisenhower being a conscious, dedicated agent of the international Communist conspiracy, he may seem demented, by the usual criteria of the political intelligence; but, more accurately, I believe, he is quite literally out of this world. What he is trying to account for is not Eisenhower’s actual political behavior, as men commonly understand it, but Eisenhower’s place, as a kind of fallen angel, in the realm of ultimate moral and spiritual values, which to him has infinitely greater reality than mundane politics.

Obama is fundamentally, essentially evil, and thus misfortune and disasters are likely to be linked with him, irrespective of obscure concerns like when he was in office.